From The Blaze:

Whitlock: US Olympic relay failure exposes the bigger problem undermining the success of black men

OP-ED
JASON WHITLOCK August 05, 2021

The Olympic 4 x 100 relay is racist. That’s the only logical explanation for the embarrassing performance of the United States men’s relay team last night and over the past two decades.

In our country, Olympic-level sprinting is dominated by black men. The 4 x 100 relay requires four black American men to work cohesively together for approximately 38 seconds.

We can’t do it. We certainly couldn’t do it last night. And we’ve struggled doing it for the past 20 years.

In a qualifying heat at the Tokyo Games, Team USA finished sixth, behind China, Canada, Italy, Germany, and Ghana. It’s impossible to make the relay final from sixth place in a heat. The United States won’t be winning any sort of medal in an event we absolutely dominated until the race turned racist after our 2000 title at the Sydney Games.

… Ibram X. Kendi argues the systemic relay racism was always there. But it wasn’t until 2008 that black Twitter and ESPN pointed out that the Proud Boys, Trump supporters, and right-wing insurrectionists began manipulating the relay batons and the baton exchange zones. This manipulation made it impossible for black American men to excel in track and field’s premier relay event.

America has not won a single medal in the relay since white bigots took control of the relay.

OK, I’m being sarcastic. Systemic racism has nothing to do with the two-decades-long failure of our once-dominant relay team. Systemic dysfunction actually explains the failure. What we witnessed last night is a symptom of a larger problem we in black America are loath to discuss.

Rather than having uncomfortable conversations with white people, we need to have uncomfortable conversations amongst ourselves concerning the fact that black men don’t function well together. …

“The USA team did everything wrong in the men’s relay,” Carl Lewis complained via Twitter. “The passing system is wrong, athletes running the wrong legs, and it was clear that there was no leadership. It was a total embarrassment, and completely unacceptable for a USA team to look worse than the AAU kids I saw.” …

Black people across the globe immigrate to America and achieve their dreams because they embrace a far different mentality than what’s cultivated in black American culture. Black sprinters in Ghana, Jamaica, Canada, and everywhere else don’t have the kind of baton problems we have.

It’s a small sample size, but, yeah, it’s been noticed for a long time in track circles that the U.S. men’s team tends to have problems in the Olympic 4x100m relay that seem to emerge from lack of practice and cooperation among the sprinters.

My theory is that the ten minutes of mind games before the start of a 100 meter final are like an 8-man weigh-in at a heavyweight championship fight.

(The women play their own alpha bitch psychological mind-games involving insane fingernails and wigs.)

So, asking top American 100 meter men to practice together at the Olympics would have been like asking Sonny Liston, Muhammad Ali, Joe Frazier, and George Foreman to team up for the good of the country.